Look, you have to establish context for these things. And I maintain that unless you appreciate the Fall of Constantinople, the Great Fire of London, and Mickey Mantle's fatalist alcoholism, live Freddy makes no sense. If you want to half-ass it, fine, go call Simon Schama to do the appendix.

After finishing my JFK book - the third on the man I've read - I'm going to read the four existing Years of Lyndon Johnson and then I'm in fabulous Nixon town, baby. I've got Stephen Ambrose's trilogy lined up and a-waiting.

God, I read them probably twenty years ago so my memory is … suspect. As I recall, Ambrose is a straight-forward writer, neither a stylist nor up-his-academic-ass dull. He published that when Nixon was being rehabilitated in the public mind and in scholarly works, so he gets a much fairer hearing than stuff that was being published in the 80s and certainly the 70s. So a bit more even-handed, tho not exactly sympathetic. Ambrose was an Eisenhower scholar, I believe, so there must have been some difficulty for him to handle a figure that Ike himself treated like a disappointing son. If you can locate a copy and want a laugh, look for Fawn Brodie's psycho-biography of Nixon. All the worst parts of Oliver Stone's Nixon movie are from that book—just clunky, armchair psychoanalysis.